In early 1993, I was doing my talk show at WCBM Monday through Friday from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Remember, this was back when Baltimore was a one-team town. It was about 1:10 in the morning as my producer Paul Mittermeier and I were chatting and unwinding as we usually did.
Then the phone rang. Paul picked it up as I started to collect my things and make my way out the door.
“Hey, this guy wants to talk to you about who’s going to buy the Orioles,” Paul said.
At the time, before Eli Jacobs declared bankruptcy, Larry Lucchino’s group was the presumptive favorite to buy the team. His group included Bill DeWitt, who ended up becoming the Cardinals’ principal owner a couple years later, and Jeffrey Loria, who eventually bought the Expos and basically traded them to MLB to gain ownership of the Marlins.
I took the call and there was a voice on the line that sounded a bit like a teamster. “Hey Stan, I just wanted to tell you who’s going to buy the Orioles.”
“Oh really, who is that going to be?” I responded.
This person told me that Peter Angelos was going to buy the team.
“Who the hell is Peter Angelos?” I remember saying.
“C’mon Stan, he’s the guy who just settled the asbestos case,” this person shot back. “He’s worth over a billion dollars and he intends to buy the team.”
I quickly got this crackpot off the phone and told Paul, “He tells me this guy I have never heard of, Peter Angelos, is going to buy the team.” Paul and I chuckled and I was out the door.
With the news that the Angelos family has agreed to sell the team for $1.725 billion to a group headed by Baltimore-born billionaire ($4.6 billion, actually) David Rubenstein, one of the founders of The Carlyle Group, I couldn’t help but think back to that call 31 years ago
Reports indicate the group also includes billionaire Mike Arougheti — co-founder of The Ares Management Corporation — as well as a couple local investors, including Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr.
Because of the tax implications of selling the team while Peter Angelos is still alive, the Angelos family cannot dispense with the team in totality until he passes. So the two sides have agreed to a sale of 40 percent of the team, until the full sale is completed upon Peter’s death.
However, Rubenstein could take over as the managing general partner sometime before the 2024 season starts.
This is a story I know I’ll be revisiting many, many times in the next couple months, but I did want to put pen to paper and reflect a bit about Peter’s tenure as the managing general partner and the five seasons his son John served as the team’s point person with MLB and ran the team with the vision he had.
The great irony here is Peter had the passion for it. He was a local guy who made it big, and man, was he willing to spend in those early years. His checkbook was always at the ready if he could beat the Yankees at anything. The Orioles actually outspent the Yankees in 1998.
What Peter couldn’t do was let Pat Gillick be Pat Gillick. Then he had a short terse relationship with Frank Wren. The one guy he could tolerate was Syd Thrift, who had long ago lost his fastball as an executive. Then there were the Mike Flanagan years that ended so sadly for both the franchise and ultimately for Flanagan.
Andy MacPhail came in as a savior and did some good things like acquiring Adam Jones, Chris Tillman and J.J. Hardy and getting the team’s spring training situation in Sarasota settled. But the wins were hard to come by, and with his father near the end, MacPhail stepped away from the Orioles to spend time with his dad.
It took Dan Duquette, an inspired hire, to come in as the executive vice president of baseball operations and give Peter another good run after 14 consecutive losing seasons. But overall, Peter ran through baseball executives too fast to develop the consistency of approach necessary to win.
In John’s short tenure, he did something his father never could do — hire someone and let them do their job. The fans’ disdain for him is something I’ll never totally understand. His biggest crime was not having access to his father’s checkbook to write the checks Peter had in the past.
Show me a perfect family. Sure, the Angelos family may not have been perfect, but they cared about Baltimore and they cared about their employees.
But for Orioles fans, it sure looks like GM Mike Elias’ chances of completing the job of winning a World Series with the club he put together just got a lot better. In fact, a hell of a lot better. For that, I expect Birdland will be rejoicing at this news.
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox